“The US mobile market is large and attractive. T-Mobile US has successfully established a disruptive position, which in many ways, is similar to the one Iliad has built in France,” Iliad officials said in a statement.

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Iliad has offered $15 billion in cash for 56.6 percent of T-Mobile US, which values its shares at $33 apiece. Iliad said the deal would value the remaining 43.4 percent of the company at $40.50per share due to “$10 billion of synergies,” leading to an overall value of $36.20 per share. That would value T-Mobile at $29 billion. Meanwhile, the bid Sprint and SoftBank are rumored to be preparing would value T-Mo at $31 billion.

Iliad’s upstart mentality actually makes it a much more natural fit for T-Mobile. T-Mobile could easily continue its “Uncarrier” onslaught on the other U.S. operators, and even take some of its cues from Free Mobile. But such a deal would bring no operational advantages to the U.S. carrier, while a merged Sprint-T-Mobile would be instantly propelled to the top ranks of global carriers with more 100 million subscribers.

On the flip side, a T-Mo-Sprint combo would also kick off a long, grueling operational integration process as they swapped out networks and tried to integrate their separate customer bases. Sprint is a CDMA carrier and T-Mobile is a GSM carrier, and if history has proven anything, it’s that these kind of mobile mega-mergers — especially between carriers with different network technologies — produce far more stagnation than innovation when they’re first executed. Sprint to this day is still recovering from its long-ago acquisition of Nextel.

As the last several quarters have shown, T-Mobile has had no trouble growing on its own. T-Mobile’s future might actually become brighter under a foreign owner than as part of Sprint.

Though both T-Mobile and Free are the fourth largest carriers in their home markets, T-Mobile is actually much larger due to the respective size of their countries. According to the Wall Street Journal, T-Mobile has a market value of $24.8 billion, while Iliad is worth only $16 billion. Iliad, however, said it would finance the deal with a combination of debt and equity and has support of multiple banks.